Boston North Inc.
Present Memories
REMEMBERING MARGARET
MEMORIES OF MY MOTHER
BY MICHAEL GRUENBAUM
It is 35 years since my mother, Margaret Gruenbaum, passed on, and I am now commemorating what would have been her 110th birthday. During the Holocaust, my sister, Marietta Emont, and I spent two and a half years with Mother in Terezin, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia . During the Nazi occupation there, my father and all our close relatives were killed. And yet my mother’s spirit could not be broken.
My mother was small in size, less than five feet tall, but a giant in spirit – each foot represented an almost infinite amount of perseverance and determination to overcome terrible trials and tribulations. Yet I was astonished, when a few days after liberation in 1945, I saw what she wrote in a letter to a friend. My wife, Thelma, quotes those powerful lines in her dedication in her book Nesarim: Child Survivors of Terezin, published by Vallentine Mitchell.
“We do not know how the future will shape up for us. None of our relatives and old friends are alive. We do not know where we are going to live. We know nothing! But somewhere in the world there is still a sun, mountains, the ocean, books, small, clean apartments, and perhaps again the possibility of rebuilding of a new life.”
Mother saved us from certain death on numerous occasions because of her perseverance and sometimes by sheer luck. A few times, she pulled us out of transports from Terezin to Auschwitz . One transport was leaving in October 1944 and we were already in the assembly area waiting to board, when she managed to contact her boss to tell him where we were and to ask for help.
She worked in the Arts Department where inmates made diverse items, including teddy bears. Her boss approached the Nazi officer in charge and told him that if the Nazis wanted to have the toy bears she was making for their children, he’d better pull her out of the transport.
The officer said: “OK, pull her out.” And the boss continued: “But she also has two children”. The officer responded: “Pull them out too, but no one else!” and issued a “pass” that exempted us from deportation. We were then moved to one of three special rooms for people excused from boarding the train. When the Germans needed 1,000 people onboard, but they had only 950, so they filled the remaining spots with people in the first two rooms. We were in the third room and thus were saved. We did not know then that the train we were taken from was the last transport sent from Terezin to Auschwitz and thus we were spared again.
A native Czechoslovakian, my mother had lived a fairly comfortable life before the Second World War. When it was over, she had nothing but the two of us and started a new life, acting as both father and mother. She arranged for us to come to the United States , where she found a clerical job and rented a small apartment to assure that she would never be a burden on us, financially or otherwise. And to the end of her life she succeeded in doing just that!
Mother also made sure that we were provided with the best education possible, and proudly enjoyed our successes. She loved life and continually marveled at Nature and its wonders. She could walk for hours along a beach, admiring things brought to shore by the sea.
She was a good person, vitally interested in the young, the suffering, and the old. She was especially sorrowed by the misfortune of the young men who fought and were disabled during the War of Independence for Israel , and sent them financial contributions for many years.
With her terrific sense of humor and philosophical way of looking at the world, she was an incisive observer of the human scene. Active by nature, even the burden of being paralyzed and in the hospital during the last few months of her life did not dampen her enthusiasm; she always managed to find something funny to tell us about her daily routine.
Mother was extremely loyal to her friends, always ready to help them on a moment’s
notice. When she passed, the expressions of sorrow from her many friends all over
the world attested to the respect and admiration they felt for her. Although she
was not a religious person in the conventional sense, she was traditional and held
fast to her faith. We, her children, grandchildren and great-
Michael Gruenbaum